Hints to the Reader

Please select a demand from the contents, according to your needs. Then calm your mind by sitting motionless on a straight-backed chair, with your spine erect. Keeping your eyes closed, or uplifted (if open), meditate on the meaning of the demand you’ve selected until it becomes a part of you. Then saturate that demand with devotion. Meditate upon it. As your meditation deepens, increase your devotion, mentally offering the demand as your own heart’s outburst. Imbue yourself in the faith that your heart’s craving, expressed through this specific demand, is being received by God.

Feel that, just behind the screen of your devotional demands, God is listening to the silent words of your soul. Feel this truth deeply; be one with your heart’s demand! Be thoroughly convinced that He has heard you. And then — go about your duties, seeking not to know whether God will grant your demand. Believe absolutely that you’ve been heard. You will know, then, that what is God’s is yours also. Unceasingly meditate on God. When you really feel Him, you will acquire dominion over all things.

Resurrect mere words from the sepulcher of dry, intellectual concepts by the Christ‐command of your own deepest perception.

Since these demands were given to me by the Universal Father, they are not my own. I only felt them, and gave them expression through the medium of words, desiring deeply to share them with you. My blessing goes with them, and I pray that they strike an answering note on the living harp strings of your heart, that you may feel them just as deeply as I have myself.

We should demand, as children of God — not pray as Beggars!

God made man in His own image. All those who have truly received Him in their souls have realized the sleeping divinity within themselves. You yourself can do likewise: Expand the powers of your mind. As a child of God you have dominion, potentially, over all things in the universe, even as He has in actuality.

The question arises, why is it that so many of our wishes remain unfulfilled? Why, indeed, do so many of God’s children suffer, and so intensely?

God, with His divine impartiality, could not have made any one child better than any other. Originally, He made all souls equally in His image. They received also great gifts of God: freedom of will, and the power to reason, and to act accordingly.

Man Suffers Because of His Own Past Actions

Somewhere, sometime in the past, all men have broken various laws of God, and have, accordingly, brought about lawful results.

All men have been given absolute liberty to reason as they choose: wrongly or rightly. Misuse of one’s God‐given reason leads to sin, which infallibly brings suffering. The right use of reason leads to joy and happiness. God is in finitely kind, gracious, and noble. He would never punish us; we cannot “offend” Him: He loves us all, saint and sinner, alike. It is we who punish ourselves through our own wrong use of reason, which leads to unlawful actions. We also reward ourselves by the inner happiness and peace of mind which follow good conduct. This alone explains why God’s responsibility ended when He first endowed man with reason and free will.

The Law of Cause and Effect Governs the Aeons of Man’s Existence

Man has misused his God‐given independence, thereby bringing on himself the physical and emotional suffering, premature death, and all griefs which accompany ignorance. He must always reap what he sows. The law of cause and effect applies to everything and everyone. Every “today” in one’s life is determined by his actions “yesterday,” and every “tomorrow” depends on the way he handles and lives his “todays.”

Thus it is that man, though created in God’s image, and potentially endowed with His powers, forsakes his claim to his very birthright: dominion over the Father’s whole universe. He does so by his own fault, born of his self‐imposed limitations. The misuse of reason, and the soul’s identification, through the ego, with the transitory body, and with environmental, hereditary, and world influences, is the cause of all human despair and misery.

How a Sleeping Son of God May Be Awakened

The fact remains that a soul, however wrong in its outward, egoic behavior, is really a sleeping son of God. The greatest sinner on earth is only an unawakened child of God, a sleeping immortal, merely refusing to receive His light fully by clarifying his own consciousness. That is why in John 1:12 we find written: “But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name.”

The ocean cannot be held in a teacup. The cup must expand to become as large as the bowl of land holding the ocean. Similarly, the cup of human consciousness must, by concentration and the purification of all human faculties, be enlarged to infinity in order to comprehend God. This it can do only by receiving, through the Guru, the consciousness of Christ. Receiving denotes capacity acquired by self‐development and inner attunement; it is different from mere belief.

How Belief in Being a Son of God Can Become Self-Realization

The purport of that quotation from St. John is that those sleeping sons of God who awake by adherence to the law, which includes spiritual discipline, “receive,” or intuit, God by their developed inner perception. Thus they regain their own latent powers as sons of God. Ignorance alone is what prompts man to imagine himself small, and to identify with his own limitations. Ignorance is the supreme sin — the greatest sin of all.

It is sleeping man who acknowledges — indeed, emphasizes— his dreams of weaknesses. It is wrong for anyone to believe himself limited by his body. He should know himself to be a part of Unlimited Spirit. It is right and good to hold firmly the thought that one is a son of God, and not a mortal son only. Indeed, it is metaphysically true that man is made in the image of God. And it is wrong to imagine that all of us are perishable creatures. By belief alone, even, we can some day realize our own souls as sons of God. Wayward children though we be, we must start by believing ourselves to be, in truth, His children. For belief is the initial condition for testing and knowing anything.

People automatically pray, when in trouble, to an unknown God in hope of relief. If delivered from trouble even accidentally they believe their prayers have been heard and answered by God. When their prayers remain unanswered, however, they become confused, and may even lose faith in God.

God, though all‐powerful, does not act unlawfully or arbitrarily merely because people pray to Him. He gives His human children independence to do as they please. To forgive man arbitrarily for his human shortcomings would suggest a contradiction of God’s own law of cause and effect. Human behavior determines every outcome in human life. Nothing is determined by divine whim. How could God be moved by flattery or praise to change the course of His own immutable laws?

There is, in ordinary prayer, altogether too much beggary and sheer ignorance. People just plead for special favors. Few pray in such a way as to touch God with their prayers. Nor do they know whether what they ask is really granted or not. Perhaps things would have happened anyway, unaffected by any prayer. People do not distinguish, either, between what they really need and what they merely want. Sometimes it is better that they not receive what they think they want. A child may reach out and even want to touch a flame, but the mother, wishing to save it from harm, will not grant that impulse or desire.

My purpose in presenting these Sacred Demands, which I have received during years of fruitful communion with our Father, is to enable my brother human beings to contact Him effectively. I prefer the word “demand” to “prayer,” because “prayer” is based on an old‐fashioned, medieval concept: God as a kingly tyrant whom we, mere subjects of His, need to supplicate and flatter.

We should not plead with God to be partial to us simply because we have pleased Him. We should not beg Him to break His laws of cause and effect, which govern all our actions. Why should He forgive us our wrong‐doing?—and without even our self-correction! Ah, but must we then bow to the inevitability of receiving passively all the fruits of our actions, as if by heartless predestination or so‐called fate?

No! There is a way out. The best way of all is not to ask favors, nor plead for amnesty from the consequences of any actual evil. Neither should we resign ourselves to painful consequences and sit idle, inviting the law to take its course. We must remember that what we have done we can, by our own actions, undo. We need simply to adopt antidotes to our own self‐poisoning behavior. Ill health can, and therefore must, be overcome by obeying the laws of good health. What, then, about chronic diseases, and sufferings of all kinds that are beyond all human control? When human methods fail, thereby revealing human limitation, then we must ask God for help in the right way. That way is to demand of God, whose power is unlimited, as His sons, not as beggars.

Every begging prayer, no matter how sincere, is self‐limiting. As sons of God we must believe that we have everything already that the Father has. This is our birthright. Jesus realized the truth: “I and my Father are One.” That is why he had dominion over everything, even as his Father had. Most of us beg and plead without first establishing, in our own minds, our divine birthright. In that way we demean ourselves.We are not beggars! We have only to reclaim, to demand of our Father that which we, through our human ignorance, imagined to be lost.

It becomes necessary, at this stage, to uproot and destroy the wrong thinking of ages, and the belief that, as human beings, we are frail and helpless. We must think, meditate, affirm, believe, and realize daily that we are sons of God! This realization may take time, but we must begin now with the right method, and no longer gamble away our birthright with affirmations of our own littleness. That foolishness has led to disbelief, doubt, and to the mental jugglery of superstition. Only when the slumbering ego perceives itself, not as a body, but as a free soul, a son of God residing in and working through the body, can it rightfully and lawfully demand its own divine rights.

The sacred demands in this book reveal many right, spiritual attitudes that have successfully drawn a response from God. It is always best, however, not to demand in another’s language. One should not consult a book on love when he speaks to his beloved. He should use the spontaneous language of his heart. What I want above all is for you to absorb the intent behind the words in these prayer‐demands. If you stay with the words themselves, make them your own. Thoroughly understand and dwell on the meaning of each demand, and apply to it your utmost concentration and love. Just as when a lover addresses his beloved in the language of great poetry, if he recites it with sincere love and feeling, he cannot do amiss.

Blind repetition of any demand or affirmation without concomitant devotion and spontaneous love makes one merely a “praying victrola,” ignorant of the significance of what one is saying. Grinding out one’s prayers vocally but mechanically, while inwardly thinking of something else, brings no response at all from God! Blind repetition is taking the name of God in vain: it is fruitless. To repeat a prayer‐demand over and over again, whether mentally or out loud, with ever‐deeper attention and devotion, spiritualizes the prayer; it changes conscious, concentrated repetition into superconscious experience.

The Divine cannot be deceived by the mockery of half‐hearted prayer, for He is the fountain of all thought. He cannot be bribed in any way. Yet it is easy to move Him with sincerity, persistency, concentrated devotion, rm determination, and faith. Long, intellectual prayers, uttered with a wandering mind, develop hypocrisy. And prayers, or even demands, uttered without understanding develop into fanaticism and superstition — hallmarks of human ignorance. To repeat a demand with deepening concentration and faith is not to pray mechanically: If one gives ever‐deeper, creative, progressive power and mental adaptiveness to every changing nuance of what he asks, he is enabled, step by step and scientifically, to reach God.

These sacred demands are logical, devotional, deep outbursts from my soul. If you prepare your mind by concentration, then deeply and with ever‐increasing faith and devotion — mentally (or aloud, in congregations)—affirm these scientific divine demands, you are bound to receive results. The most important prayer‐demand you can utter is to re‐establish your unity with the Divine Father‐Mother as His/Her eternal son. Realize God, and you will receive everything. Jesus himself said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matthew 6:33)

Do not dig up, now and then, the demand‐seed you sow in order to examine it. Sow it with faith, then let it germinate to its own fulfillment. Sow your demand‐seed carefully, with full concentration; and water it by daily repetition; be intelligently aware of what you are doing. Never get discouraged if results are not immediately forthcoming. Be rm in your demands.

Be also stubborn! Slowly you will retrieve your lost, divine heritage. And then will God, the Supremely Relishable, visit your heart and make His home there. Demand until you’ve established your right to your divine inheritance. Demand unceasingly of your Father all that rightly belongs to you, and you will receive His blessing of eternal life in Him.

In demanding rightly there is no room for superstition, disappointment, hesitation, or doubt. Once you learn to operate that right chain of causation which effectually moves the divine heart, you will know that He never hid from you: it was you who hid from Him behind the shadow of your own self‐created darkness! Once you feel yourself to be truly a son of God, your steadfast mental discipline and devotional love, expressed in meditation, will give you dominion over all things.

If, however, your demands remain unfulfilled and unanswered, you will have only yourself and your own past actions to blame. Do not despair or grow despondent. Never say that you’ve become resigned to your fate, nor decide you may as well accept what seem the preordained commands of a whimsical God. Try instead, with increased effort after each failure, to obtain what has not yet been granted you: what you have not yet received because of some fault of your own, or some defect in your way of asking. It is all yours already in the Spirit. Demand, then, with sacred devotion, and with recognition of your divine birthright as a child of God.

To know how and when to pray correctly, according to the nature of your demands, is what will, and cannot fail to, bring the desired results. When the demand is made rightly — not selfishly, but in a self‐giving way — it will set in motion in your favor the very laws of God. The operation of that law alone can bear results scientifically. For God abides by the laws He Himself has made.